Help configuring proftpd
 

Ok, first the apology. Normally I'd plough through docs for a few weeks and tinker until I've learned what I needed, however I'm in a bit of a hurry. I spent yesterday and this morning digging through any tutorial and doc I could find to learn, but none seemed to take it quite as far as I need to go. I just installed Mandrake 9.2 over the weekend to get into the wonderful world of Linux, and also to build myself a little web server to develop pages on.

Is there anywhere I can find a good tutorial that shows how to create a user, set up permissions to create files and folders, and either chroot or simply start the user in the html directory? So far my searches (while blowing off work this morning) have come up empty.

Normally, I'd spend the time learning all this alone, but I've got a new website job about to start and would like to get the server up so I don't have to rely on my hosting service for debugging and such. I have Apache, PHP, and MySQL up and configured, and now just need an easy way to upload the pages from my dev box. FTP seemed the likely choice, and as proftpd was installed with the distro, seemed like a no-brainer.

I have the server up, and accepting connections (authenticating as my user account), but I can't figure out how to either create a new account, or give my current account permission to browse to the /var/www/html dir and upload files. At one point I was able to browse there, but not create or write files. Somewhere along the way I screwed that up and can no longer even browse beyond my user directory. I'm assuming that much of this is more just the linux side of things than the ftp configuration, but I'm in the dark on both.

Well, why don't you just 'adduser'? Proftp does chroot by default. Just edit sshd.conf and make sure just the users who need access to it get access. When I ran something like that I just made a small script to create all that was needed... (For example:)
adduser $
passwd $
mkdir /home/$1/htmlroot
mkdir /var/www/html/$1
chown $1:$1 /var/www/html/$1

etc.... You could also start the user in their html directory(having wwwroot in subfolder is just my preference), just edit the proftpd config. Personally I use pure-ftpd so don't really remember proftpd config, but maybe someone else can field that one. Should be easy.

post your configuration file for proftpd it should be /etc/proftpd.conf and maybe we can see what you can tinker with and change.
to create a new user to your Linux box just use useradd <name> -d <home dir>
and after you do this you can give it a password by doing passwd <name>